All posts tagged Charles Boustany

Republican lawmakers on Tuesday warned that Americans getting larger health-insurance subsidies than they should under the Affordable Care Act will face a tax hit come April.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency overseeing the health law, has said that at the end of May there were around 1.2 million people whose insurance-exchange applications for coverage had income inconsistencies. That could include people who had misstated their income, had a change in family status, or who got a bonus or raise. Read More »

Legislative fights this fall on Capitol Hill won’t get any easier in the wake of the latest bruising budget battle.

The next set of fiscal deadlines and worries about the more painful round of the across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester, which go into effect in mid-January, are likely to overshadow everything else. That leaves lawmakers with only a narrow window to tackle any remotely controversial legislation before the 2014 midterm dynamics completely overtake the agenda.

House lawmakers used to believe the first year of each two-year cycle could focus more on policy than politics, said Rep. Charles Boustany, a Louisiana Republican first elected to Congress in 2004. Now, he said, “it seems we’re in an unending political cycle.”… Read More »

One of the few paths to averting a government shutdown before midnight tonight is for House Speaker John Boehner to give up the fight to delay the new federal health law. If that happened, Mr. Boehner would need to make the case to his fellow House Republicans that they should end their standoff over the law, at least for now, with the Senate.

Signs are already appearing of what the GOP message might be in that case: The battle against the health law has obscured a bigger fight over spending—which Republicans are winning.

“This is a huge victory that nobody has talked about,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R., Fla.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said in an interview Sunday. “The spending portion of the spending bill we have won.”… Read More »

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